Posts Tagged "impression"

Do our circumstances in life have anything to do with the satisfaction we experience?
“Married churchgoers tend to outscore single nonbelievers in happiness surveys, but health, wealth, good looks, and status have astonishingly little effect on what the researchers call “subjective well-being.” People living in extreme poverty are, on average, less happy than those whose basic needs are met. But once we cross that threshold, greater wealth stops making life richer,” states Geoffrey Cowley (with Anne Underwood), Newsweek, September 16, 2002.
Traveling to third world countries and seeing how other people live can give an individual a very different perspective on happiness. I had the good fortune to have parents who valued traveling highly. My dad worked,...

Traveling began in our family because of an incident my mother experienced when she was working as a registered nurse at Corvallis Manor Nursing Home in Corvallis, Oregon. A professor who taught history at Oregon State University was admitted into a private room across from the main entrance. Being mentally alert, he would start screaming at the top of his lungs because of the pain he was in, and perhaps because of the confinement at having to remain bed fast the rest of his life.
Finding his wife crying in the facility’s bathroom one evening, the head nurse inquired why she was upset. Explaining that they had waited until his retirement to fulfill a lifelong dream, she was leaving the next day for a six week safari to Africa, which he was in no condition to...